Getting most out of Server and Application Monitor

Question

Hi guys, I'm a newbie to Solarwinds. We recently installed SAM 6.6, and have gone through the process of adding the nodes, some application monitors and setting up alerts. What I would like is to understand all that SAM can do (from application perspective). Recently I came across this article which gave a few ideas for application level alerts in Solarwinds:

1. SQL Jobs status, or if they are not running. DB Latency, replication etc.

2. Windows Services, Web Applications status etc.

3. Our custom applications can forward critical errors to windows error log, which Solarwinds can then pick up and display.

What other ideas do you guys have and how can I implement those? Also any tips for creating a concise NOC view (e.g. what kind of information should be displayed in what kind of charts)?

Thanks alot!!!

lcsw2013 · Answer

SAM is an amazing powerful tool. It can in many ways automate different tasks if you wanted it too. Just as a simple example, IIS, Setup a monitor for IIS, set your thresholds, and if it reaches your threshold you can set it to trigger an alert with an action to restart IIS, and if there are any secondary failures you can set the alert to have a escalation step to send out an email. This is very overly simplified high level example here. But should give a small insight into how powerful SAM can be when it comes to providing value.

In our environment we are heavy users of AppInsight for SQL. It provides many different performance metrics we use to get a general health assessment of how our SQL servers are running. We also have custom templates built for example to read event logs and search for certain event id's to alert on such as for server reboots. We have been experimenting with powershell templates to get specific information from windows servers and perl scripting to get information on the unix side.

It has alot of flexibility to deploy the tool in a way that works for your needs. So the main question would be, what are you interested in monitoring when it comes to application monitoring? I'm willing to bet more than likely there just might be a way to get it done through SAM.

And for us, we have our NOC view rotating between different pages that provide different information. For example one page general health, another page server health, another page network health, etc. It all boils down to what information you want your NOC view to show. What is important to you?

Hope this helps.